1. Awful performance against a low major. Only reason we won is that Ace Bailey played a great game and hit shots that nobody else can hit. 23 points on 9-15 (2-4) shooting.
2. Defense is still bad. Couldn’t contain Clark, who abused everybody (especially JMike) off the dribble all night on his way to 22 points (10-19 from the field). Let up a ton of open threes, but Merrimack was only 4-24 from deep. We especially struggled on pick and roll and high screen action.
3. Our zone offense was mind numbingly bad, and a lot of the problem was Pike’s ridiculous rotations. In a game where we knew we would face a 3-2 zone the entire game, why did Ogbole play 19 minutes? This should’ve been the game where Martini played 20 minutes at the center spot. Hayes only played 14 minutes. Our best 3-point shooters (Hayes and Martini) only combined to shoot 5 threes, and we only shot 17 threes out of a total of 60 shots (so only 29% of our shots were from deep, a terribly low number against a zone defense). It’s like we didn’t even practice zone offense over the past five days.
4. We kept trying to force the ball into the paint, whether on post entries or dribble drives, but Merrimack’s zone defense did a great job collapsing and forcing tough mid-range jumpers and short floaters, and whereas we were money on short twos in the previous three games, we were awful tonight, short-arming a ton of those shots. We’re we’re just 18-43 on 2-point shots tonight, just 41.8%.
5. I don’t think we scored ANY points in transition, as Merrimack did a superb job of getting back on defense and immediately setting up their zone, and they immediately found their man on defense. So this became a tortuous half-court game.
2. Defense is still bad. Couldn’t contain Clark, who abused everybody (especially JMike) off the dribble all night on his way to 22 points (10-19 from the field). Let up a ton of open threes, but Merrimack was only 4-24 from deep. We especially struggled on pick and roll and high screen action.
3. Our zone offense was mind numbingly bad, and a lot of the problem was Pike’s ridiculous rotations. In a game where we knew we would face a 3-2 zone the entire game, why did Ogbole play 19 minutes? This should’ve been the game where Martini played 20 minutes at the center spot. Hayes only played 14 minutes. Our best 3-point shooters (Hayes and Martini) only combined to shoot 5 threes, and we only shot 17 threes out of a total of 60 shots (so only 29% of our shots were from deep, a terribly low number against a zone defense). It’s like we didn’t even practice zone offense over the past five days.
4. We kept trying to force the ball into the paint, whether on post entries or dribble drives, but Merrimack’s zone defense did a great job collapsing and forcing tough mid-range jumpers and short floaters, and whereas we were money on short twos in the previous three games, we were awful tonight, short-arming a ton of those shots. We’re we’re just 18-43 on 2-point shots tonight, just 41.8%.
5. I don’t think we scored ANY points in transition, as Merrimack did a superb job of getting back on defense and immediately setting up their zone, and they immediately found their man on defense. So this became a tortuous half-court game.
